Summary
Puerto Rico’s latest power outage has left over 1.3 million customers without power on New Year’s Eve.
The outage is attributed to an infrastructure problem at a power plant on the island’s southern coast.
LUMA, the energy company, is working to restore power in phases, but it may take up to 48 hours.
Customers?
Of course the colony has a private energy grid
After hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017 LUMA was developed. It is a partnership between ATCO (Canada) and Quanta Services Inc (USA) to develop and modernize Puerto Rico’s electrical grid over a 15-year contract. (source)
As such it is a privately-owned grid, not unlike dozens of others in the US. The only difference is that Puerto Rico does NOT receive any federal funds to help offset the costs of the upgrades … the citizens pay every cent themselves to those privately-owned companies.
What power grids receive public funds for upgrades? Even my public grid on the mainland is funded entirely by my municipality and state.
It was privatized under Trump after all the rolling blackouts the public grid kept having. So far it has actually rather improved in quality somehow.
Terrible to see for Puerto Rico.
“customers” not people
In this case, “customers” may be more precise, bc if like a whole family has one account that’s only one customer, but perhaps representing 5+ people affected?
And a business could be even worse, affecting >10 people.
You are accurate from a buisness perspective. Though, they would not be referred to this way if they were on the mainland and would be handled more urgently.
Like people choose to have power to their house.
It should be a human right.
Is the Biden administration going do anything about this before Trump takes over and ignores our territory.
Biden called the governor and offered federal aid.
